Sensory History: A Primer

Everyone loves lists. The editors of Tropics of Meta have shown how much fun lists of scholarly books can be. Alex Cummings identifies ten books crucial to the study of media history, and Ryan Reft adds nineteen that explore U.S. military history (war and society). Both lists provide a pleasant introduction to excellent scholarship in important but sometimes misunderstood fields.

In the same spirit, here’s a gentle invitation to ease your way into another fascinating but somewhat mysterious field, sensory history. Although there is nothing new about the explicit study of the five human senses (Aristotle shaped basic ideas about the role, meaning, and uses of the senses that still pervade the Western world), sensory studies emerged only recently as an academic field of study. Since the 1990s, anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, art historians, literary scholars and many others have produced ever more imaginative explorations of how our senses work in social and cultural context. What we understand through looking, listening, smelling, tasting and touching varies from culture to culture. Historians for the last fifteen years have joined sensory studies and have demonstrated that our perception and experience is different today from past generations or centuries. Sensory history has become one of the tools of scholars working on many topics in America, Europe, and the world.

But, you ask, what the hell is sensory history? How can historians get at the sensory experience of past worlds, and what difference does it make? The following list offers some choice places to look for your answers.

What did the Puritans think when they heard thunder or the war whoops of Native Americans or the music of Africans? If historians still tend to treat colonial New England as a tale of the Puritans’ “errand into the wilderness,” Rath gives us “The Howling Wilderness.” It’s a lot more fun.

Cummings lists Corbin’s work on sound, Village Bells as foundational for media history, and it belongs on this list, too. His study of smell, however, has been even more influential for sensory historians. No one has made a more ambitious case for the persistent importance in modern times of olfaction. Moreover, Corbin’s work paved the way for the outpouring of sensory history after 2000.

This is the outlier on the list, both because of its early date and the fact that it’s not a proper history. However, when the Canadian media theorist McLuhan published this bold argument about the birth of “typographical man” and the connection between technology, literacy and culture, he launched his own meteoric rise to cultural influence and formed some of the basic questions sensory scholars still grapple with today.

Few have been willing to tackle the task of writing an overall history of the senses across time and space, and Jütte’s effort is heavily loaded with German examples, but remains essential. Read it to learn why it matters that before the world wars, “Germany was rather behind the times with regard to vibrators.”

Jackson Pollock can’t have all the fun. The New York art world lionized the abstract expressionist when the critic Clement Greenberg anointed him, and this massive biography explores the processes of “Becoming Greenberg” and the “Tyranny of the Eye.” It’ll change the way you see paintings during your next visit to the museum.

Not the easiest read, but certainly one of the most authoritative and exhaustively, imaginatively researched. Sterne’s expertise in the technologies of sound reproduction and the emergence of new cultures of listening makes this work of enduring importance.

Wonderfully illustrated, Thompson’s book explores technology, place and space, the creation of harmonious new sounds and the struggle for noise abatement in the big city. This is the place to read about “the Big Noise.”

Mack, a cultural historian at the School of the Art Institute, explores the role of the senses in the rise of Chicago from the Civil War through the end of the First World War, a period encompassing such milestones as the Great Fire and the Haymarket Affair. His manuscript for the University of Illinois Press captures the way Chicagoans of different classes coped with the sensory shocks of rapid urban growth and industrialization, and it includes a fascinating sketch of the sensory biography of Upton Sinclair at the time he composed The Jungle.

Comments

Reblogged this on DailyHistory.org and commented:
The Tropics of Meta have come up with a new booklist, but this one is unique. It is a booklist for Sensory History. What? I had not heard of Sensory History and was not aware of most of these books. It is a fascinating list.